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Route 3 : A tour to the Karst landform, enjoying landscapes and underground wonders

(People's Daily Online)    14:25, August 15, 2013
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(Provided to People's Daily Online/Guo Jianlin)

Jiuxiang, Shilin, Alu Ancient Cave, Mile Lake, Puzhehei, Bamei

Suggested itinerary: six days and five nights
1st day: Jiuxiang; 2nd day: Shilin; 3rd day: Alu Ancient Cave; 4th day: Mile Lake; 5th day: Puzhehei; 6th day: Bamei

Shilin, the World Natural Heritage, is the museum of Karst landform.

(Notes: Being an agglomeration of all types of stone forest landscapes, one may call the geopark the "Karst Stone Forest Museum" that has both very high scientific and aesthetic values.

Since 2007, two parts of the site, the Naigu Stone Forest and Suogeyi Village, have been acknowledged as UNESCO World Heritage Sites as part of the South China Karst.)

It takes a long time to count the karst caves in Jiuxiang and Alu Ancient Cave. The caves in the area are praised for their grandeur, wonder grotesquerie and natural beauty.

(Notes: Jiuxiang is known as the "museum of karst caves", which boasts its caves as the largest in scale and number (there are about a hundred karst caves) and has the most wonderful in-cave scenes in China. The caves in the area are praised for their grandeur, wonder grotesquerie and natural beauty.

The Alu Ancient Cave, reputed as the first wonderful cave in Yunnan Province, features an underground karst cave landscape which looks like an upside down stone forests. The Alu Ancient Cave is actually a large complex of grotesque limestone cave groups. This forest of stone, formed by erosion over millions of years, is comprised of many stone peaks, pillars and stalagmites rising abruptly from the ground and extending as far as the eye can see. These caves have many specific and strange characteristics, like spring running out of cave, deep river flowing in the cave, long tunnel zigzagging along the cave, sky seeing through the cave.)

Hot springs in the Mile Lake are scattered like stars in the mountains.

Puzhehei Scenic Spot boasts its rich lotus resources and charming lake sceneries. Fisherman’s songs echo in the lotus pond. Boats stroll in the looming mountains.

You can enter the land of idyllic beauty, Bamei, by rowing into the cave. The land was flat and spacious. There were houses arranged in good order with fertile fields, beautiful ponds, bamboo groves, mulberry trees and paths crisscrossing the fields in all directions.

(Notes: The famous Chinese litterateur Tao Yuanming who lived during the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420) once told of a Peach Blossom Valley isolated from the hustle and bustle of the ordinary world. People lived there in peaceful, serene isolation. In Bamei, you sleep under the star-studded sky and you wake up to the roosters' crowing. To the villagers who have been here since their ancestors found this perfect hideout, their property is, in some way, their treasure.)

(Editor:YeXin、Chen Lidan)

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